High-Performance Linux Clustering

An anonymous reader writes "High Performance Computing (HPC) has become easier, and two reasons are the adoption of open source software concepts and the introduction and refinement of clustering technology. This first of two articles discusses the types of clusters available, uses for those clusters, reasons clusters have become popular for HPC, some fundamentals of HPC, and the role of Linux in HPC."

Comments

Geek

[mysqlrocks]

With Linux and other freely available open source software components for clustering and improvements in commodity hardware, the situation now is quite different. You can build powerful clusters with a very small budget and keep adding extra nodes based on need.

Yea, I'd like to build one but I'm not sure what I'd use it for. Does that mean I'm a geek?

Advice: Don't use Itaniums for Linux cluster

[Work Account]

We spent $849,000 on an Itanium cluster and have recently found ourselves SOL since it's a dying architecture.

You can't even run Java on them.

This hasn't been my experience

[composer777]

From everything I've seen, MOSIX is having some issues right now. Unfortunately, MOSIX is one of the easiest, most flexible ways to set up an HPC, and ever since they forked, development has been slow. I did research about 2 months ago to look into setting up a small MOSIX cluster with a few computers. My main goal was to get my feet wet in setting up a cluster using a few desktop and laptop computers. I figured that setting up a cluster with my Athlon 64 x2, Athlon 64 3500+, and a few laptops would speed up compile times by quite a bit. But, it appears that the 2.6 version of MOSIX is still beta and won't support the kernel I need for my Athlon 64 x2 (versions before 2.6.9 don't support powernow with the x2, and also tend to be flaky). So, I have the choice of running a cluster with slower PC's, or waiting for better support. If you look at the year on some of those whitepapers, only one was written this year, and I'd be willing to bet they are describing how to use MOSIX with the 2.4 kernel, not 2.6. I finally gave up on the idea, as running the latest kernel is more important to me.

Imagine

[temojen]

Zero CPU implementations of this.

Not to pick at Big Blue

[Frumious Wombat]

But their links could at least have mentioned OSCAR http://oscar.openclustergroup.org/ or my personal favorite, ROCKS http://www.rocksclusters.org/, as these are more prevalent than xCat systems.

Personally, I like Rocks, as I ran three parallel architectures (i386/AMD64/IA64), on the same based distribution, just with each tuned to their particular processor. Comes with SGE and Myrinet support out of the box, and there are Rolls, i.e. custom software assemblages, for OpenPBS, for those who prefer it, as well as PVFS. It's easy to set up, and easy to administer, as the nodes are presumed to be interchangeable and disposable. When you reboot a node, it's obliterated and a fresh OS and supplementary package repository are laid down on a clean disk. No questions about version skew.

They now have a custom roll to help you build a visualization wall, but I never had a chance to try that one. (try convincing your boss that you want 4 digital projectors and a big room to play with)

The downside to the above distributions are that they presume batch-queue environments, which is appropriate for most of my work, but less so for many people trying to simulate owning an SMP, without paying SMP prices.

Other people assure me that the current version of OSCAR is solid as well, but they seem to lag in the multiple architecture support area (Itanium is always behind), and don't current support AMD64 natively. On the other hand, they build on top of several RedHatish linuces, as opposed to Rocks where you get Centos (RHEL), period.